Groups Protest Summers’ Silence

As a real earthquake hit Cambridge this weekend, aftershocks from the public rift between University President Lawrence H. Summers and outgoing Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 continued to shake the campus, as students participated in rallies questioning Summers’ commitment to diversity and an act of protest that implied Summers was racist.

This weekend witnessed the first action by a coalition of roughly a dozen minority and activist student groups in a campaign to push Summers and the Harvard Corporation—Harvard’s most powerful governing body—to take more “proactive steps towards increasing diversity in the faculty, administration, and student body at Harvard.”

The coalition staged two protests—a silent march through the Yard on Friday and a rally yesterday afternoon on the steps of Widener Library.

Fred O. Smith ’04, the political action chair of the Black Students’ Association who served as master of ceremonies for yesterday’s rally, said the groups were inspired to collaborate by a combination of factors.

West’s resignation and students’ frustration at Summers’ “inactivity and indifference” towards issues like the creation of a Latino Studies department, the advancement of Queer Studies at Harvard, and the distribution of an Ethnic Studies certificate were chief among those factors.

“We want to motivate Summers to be a more proactive president regarding issues of diversity,” Smith said.

He said the coalition would also like Summers to make his position on the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) more clear.

Earlier this year, Summers publicly questioned Harvard’s “unorthodox” funding for students participating in the ROTC but has not suggested any alternate plans for such funding.

The undergraduate groups involved in the diversity coalition include: the Black Students Association (BSA), Black Men’s Forum (BMF), Association of Black Harvard Women, Asian American Association, RAZA, Bisexual Gay Lesbian and Transgender Student Alliance (BGLTSA), Girlspot, Diversity and Distinction and the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM).

Representatives of the Black Law Students Association and the Kennedy School of Government’s Black Students Caucus also participated in this weekend’s actions.

At Friday’s march, students wore white collared shirts and ties and covered their faces with white face masks to represent the uniformity of the Harvard Faculty.

They marched from Philips Brooks House to the Science Center and then to University Hall, where they staged a rally.

Yesterday’s rally on the steps of Widener drew a crowd of roughly forty people. Several students carried a banner that read, “Where is the diversity at our University?” while another hoisted into the air a long pole that had a large papier-mâché version of Summers’ head—complete with dollar signs as eyes—attached to its end.

The students who addressed the crowd expressed their frustration at what they deemed Summers’ “unresponsiveness” to their efforts to increase the diversity of Harvard’s curriculum. They expressed concern that their conventional methods for pushing for reform have fallen on deaf ears.

“It seems like the only time anything happens around here is when someone takes over a building,” said Daniel Dimaggio ’03, a PSLM member who spoke at yesterday’s rally.

The coalition passed around a petition and Smith said 33 signatures were collected yesterday, for a total of 443 signatures collected since Friday.

“As members of the Harvard community, we are concerned with the many incidents over the past year that demonstrate a lack of leadership from your administration on important issues of diversity in the faculty, administration and curriculum,” the petition reads.

The coalition may attempt to present this petition to the Corporation this afternoon during a “teach-in” that it plans to hold at 1 p.m. outside Loeb House, where the Corporation holds its regularly scheduled meetings.

Tomorrow night, the coalition will hold a meeting in Adams House to plan further action.

Another Approach

This weekend’s rallies represented a more organized manifestation of the current of discontent over Summers’ perceived role in West’s departure for Princeton.

On Friday night at Eleganza—the annual fashion show and event sponsored by the Black Community Action and Student Theater (BlackCAST)—members of the mock a capella group “The Callblacks,” performed a version of the Will Smith song “Summertime” called “Summerstime.”

The audience laughed and applauded as the performers, clad in orange—the school color of Princeton, where West will teach next year—sang and rapped revised lyrics to the song, including the refrain, “Summers, Summers time, time to get those darkies back in line.”

But the mood of the audience shifted when some members of the group began smearing black makeup on their faces, and one member of the group began imitating a slave driver.

The members of the group declined to comment about their performance.

—Staff writer Kate L. Rakoczy can be reached at rakoczy@fas.harvard.edu.